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NOVICE - Mandrak 10.1 ;and to Linux e

Oh help............puleeze.............here am I a novice escaping from Microsoft after twenty years of slavery and having awful problems. My Epiphany browser wont display emails on Yahoo in HTML and a search of the browser shows no reasonable help file index search. I´ve tried downloading Firefox and cannot get it to install because there is an error every time I extract the files to my Downloads folder. I managed to download a slide viewer gthumb2.6.5 but the shell command won t work on the ´confiugre´ and I have to click on the file itself in the folder then I cannot find ´make´ or ´make file´ in the gthumb folder to double click nor can I do it from a command line.

If windows MS does one thing it really spoils users by its simple ´instal´ or ´setup´ exe files.

Can anyone tell me where to start with this please............ANY advice would be welcome and if you could post your reply to garthadamsworld@yahoo.com it would be most appreciated.

While you're getting comfortable with Linux and you're 'drake-styling it, use urpmi -- Mandriva's rpm wrapper -- for installing stuff whenever possible. You'll need to "configure sources" for urpmi (i.e. give it some addresses for http or ftp software repositories), this can be done by simply following the directions at easyurpmi. Once urpmi is configured, getting software (and dependencies too!) is often as easy as:

Code:

# urpmi -v <software>

where <software> could be, for example, mozilla-firefox.

When urpmi does not find what you want, you could commence with the compiling. When you attempted to configure, did it look something like this:

Code:

$ ./configure

The "./" is important because a dot, meaning current working directory, is not in your $PATH variable (and shouldn't be). Also make should be run as root; to become root use

Code:

$ su
<enter root password>

Man pages will tell you most of what you need to know about most terminal commands. For info on <someCommand>, try